Chapter 5 Climatological and Hydrological Field Monitoring

On the mountainous slopes of tropical volcanic islands, steep topo-climatic gradients serve to compress distinctive ecosystems and local biodiversity into spatially restricted, vertically stratifi ed environmental zones. This physical heterogeneity also presents a diverse range of constraints and opportunities for human landscape use and transformation, leading, in the case of most Pacifi c high islands, to a complex and interdependent spatial mosaic of natural and anthropogenic landscapes closely bounded spatially and strongly interconnected. The aboriginal settlers of the Pacifi c islands gained intimacy with these small yet complex environmental systems and in many cases evolved land tenure systems (e.g., the ahupua`a land management unit in Hawai`i) that explicitly acknowledged their understanding of upland-lowland (cf. watershed) environmental linkages in supporting sustainable agricultural and related traditional land-use systems (Fig. 1.2, p. 6). Modern global economic integration, along with rapid social, cultural and demographic change in the colonial and post-colonial Pacifi c, today present a host of impacts that work to disrupt and destabilize small island human-environment relations. In many ways these impacts are no different from the environmental issues confronting the world as a whole, they are simply playing out at a more rapid pace and in a much smaller and circumscribed geographical arena.